Changes in the media landscape have become an immediate threat to the -financial- survival of The Automatic Earth. It's time to Support Us! Make a one-time and/or recurring Donation. Our Paypal widget is in the top left corner of this site (bottom of page on mobile). The address for checks and money orders is on our Store and Donations page.

France has drafted in extra security forces including army troops to try to prevent any repeat of violence during gilets jaunes protests in Paris or other cities this weekend. Police, gendarmes and soldiers will be deployed in a show of force in the capital and in the southern city of Nice, where the president, Emmanuel Macron, will meet his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, for a state visit on Sunday. Despite a ban on protests in parts of Nice, yellow vest organisers have called for a demonstration there on Saturday, the 19th day of action. Protests are also expected in other French cities. Critics see the deployment of troops from Operation Sentinelle, which was established after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, as provocative.

Macron’s administration views the potential escalation of civil unrest as a serious challenge to its authority and is determined to regain the upper hand after it was accused of being unprepared for last week’s riots. Last weekend protests in Paris were hijacked by rioters and looters who destroyed luxury shops, newspaper kiosks and one of the country’s most exclusive restaurants on the Champs Élysées. The Paris police prefect was sacked after his officers were accused of failing to stop the unrest. The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, spoke to the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, and the local prefect, Georges-François Leclerc, on Thursday to reassure them that security forces would be deployed to avoid a repeat of last weekend’s clashes and destruction.

[..] Officials say soldiers will be used this weekend to protect key buildings, freeing up police and gendarmes to control crowds. Bruno Leray, the Paris military chief, told French radio they could “go so far as to open fire …if their life is threatened or the life of those people they are defending”. The hard-left politician Jean-Luc Mélenchon said Leray’s admission was “grave” and could “feed a fatal escalation” of violence. A number of gilets jaunes have been injured by police firing rubber bullets. “Maintaining order is not a task to be given to the army. The army’s mission is to defend the nation against its enemies, and in no way can demonstrators be considered internal enemies,” Mélenchon wrote in a letter to the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, on Friday.

Robert Mueller’s latest service to America is all but complete. But the reverberations from his yet-to-be-revealed report could amount to inestimable political and constitutional consequences. The conclusion of the special counsel’s investigation was an important landmark in itself, at a moment in America’s modern history when governing institutions are under intense strain. It demonstrated that so far at least, a credible legal examination is possible into the most explosive of charges against an unchained President, without interference and despite the bitter polarization of the times. The question now is whether everyone accepts the result.

The nation could learn within days whether Mueller answered key inquiries: Did Trump cooperate with a hostile foreign power to win the 2016 election? Did he use that platform to seek to enrich himself with multi-billion dollar business deals in Russia? Did the President obstruct justice, including by firing FBI Director James Comey, in an effort to cover it all up? And is there any evidence to suggest why Trump often appears to be obedient to Russian President Vladimir Putin, following fears felt deep within the FBI that the US President was compromised? And can he explain the multiple suspicions contacts between Trump’s associates and Russians — both before and after the election — and the lies they all told about those relationships?

Trump’s team is already celebrating, claiming it is already clear that the President has already been vindicated since Mueller did not indict anyone for cooperating with Russian election meddling. The lack of charges against Trump’s son, Donald Jr. and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who were involved in a 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Russians offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton, especially disappointed his critics. Their escape proved the shrewdness of Trump’s consistent messaging that the only question that mattered in an investigation that held Washington spellbound for two years was whether there was collusion. “The fat lady has sung,” one Trump aide told CNN’s Jim Acosta.

if you’re going to accuse a sitting president of being a Russian intelligence asset, you kind of need to be able to prove it, or (a) you defeat the whole purpose of the exercise, (b) you destroy your own credibility, and (c) you present that sitting president with a powerful weapon he can use to bury you. This is not exactly rocket science. As any seasoned badass will tell you, when you’re resolving a conflict with another seasoned badass, you don’t take out a gun unless you’re going to use it. Taking a gun out, waving it around, and not shooting the other badass with it, is generally not a winning strategy. What often happens, if you’re dumb enough to do that, is that the other badass will take your gun from you and either shoot you or beat you senseless with it.

This is what Trump is about to do with Russiagate. When the Mueller report fails to present any evidence that he “colluded” with Russia to steal the election, Trump is going to reach over, grab that report, roll it up tightly into a makeshift cudgel, and then beat the snot out of his opponents with it. He is going to explain to the American people that the Democrats, the corporate media, Hollywood, the liberal intelligentsia, and elements of the intelligence agencies conspired to try to force him out of office with an unprecedented propaganda campaign and a groundless special investigation. He is going to explain to the American people that Russiagate, from start to finish, was, in his words, a ridiculous “witch hunt,” a childish story based on nothing. Then he’s going to tell them a different story.

I write to notify you pursuant to 28 C.F.R. 600.9(a)(3) that Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III has concluded his investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and related matters. In addition to this notification, the Special Counsel regulations require that I provide you with “a description and explanation of instances (if any) in which the Attorney General” or acting Attorney General “concluded that a proposed action by a Special Counsel was so inappropriate or unwarranted under established Departmental practices that it should not be pursued.” 28 C.F.R. 600.9(a)(3). There were no such instances during the Special Counsel’s investigation.

The Special Counsel has submitted to me today a “confidential report explaining the prosecution or delineation decisions” he has reached, as required by 28 C.F.R. 600.8(c). I am reviewing the report and anticipate that I may be in a position to advise you of the Special Counsel’s principal conclusions as soon as this weekend. Separately, I intend to consult with Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein and Special Counsel Mueller to determine what other information from the report can be released to Congress and the public consistent with the law, including the Special Counsel regulations, and the Department’s long-standing practices and policies. I remain committed to as much transparency as possible, and I will keep you informed as to the status of my review.

Finally, the Special Counsel regulations provide that “the Attorney General may determine that public release of” this notification “would be in the public interest.” I have so determined, and I will disclose this letter to the public after delivering it to you.

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks has launched a fundraiser to “facilitate the full publication” of the long-awaited Russiagate report, as many wonder: why pay for a nothingburger that’s poised to be released to the public anyway? While some wondered if the WikiLeaks’ twitter account was ‘hacked’ by the Democrats, many wondered why the whistleblowers’ website would seek to raise so much money to publish ‘literally nothing.’ Most netizens, however, seemed puzzled by the initiative, with reactions ranging from accusations of trying to ‘bribe’ Robert Mueller to the idea that WikiLeaks is trying to get hold of the report to release a ‘redacted’ version of it.

ANNOUNCE: @WikiLeaks launches $1m goal for the full publication of the 'Mueller report'. All contributions to over the next seven days (from now until Friday 29 March 23:59 GMT) will be exclusively used to facilitate the full publication of the report. https://t.co/MsNZhrTzTLpic.twitter.com/buyvw1Yvs1

Pressure on Theresa May has reached new heights as ministers backed attempts to let parliament take control of the next stage of the Brexit process and MPs openly speculated that her time in office could end within weeks. As a beleaguered May returned from Brussels, MPs suggested her deal could lose by an even higher margin, with several saying the timing now required the prime minister to “fall on her sword”. May wrote to Tory MPs on Friday in an attempt to address some of the criticism and regain control over the process. In her letter, she even hinted she may not bring her deal back to parliament for the third time without “sufficient support” and apologised for the tone of her statement on Wednesday night where she blamed MPs for the Brexit impasse.

MPs had earlier suggested that it could be pointless for the prime minister to attempt to pass her deal next week, after a defiant statement by the Democratic Unionist party where they rejected the current state of negotiations. In her letter, May said the decision of the EU council meant she would bring back her deal next week “if it appears there is sufficient support and the Speaker permits it”. The prime minister said a number of colleagues had raised concerns about her speech in Downing Street on Wednesday. “You have a difficult job to do and it was not my intention to make it any more difficult,” she wrote, offering to hold more meetings with MPs next week. May will face further pressure from hundreds of thousands of members of the public expected to join the Put it to the People march in London on Saturday to demand a second referendum, after millions signed a petition to revoke article 50.

EU leaders cannot say explicitly that they no longer want to deal with the current prime minister. Urging regime change is beyond the pale of normal diplomacy among democratic states. But there is no effort to conceal the frustration in May or the evacuation of confidence in her as a negotiating partner. The one thing everyone in Brussels, Berlin and Paris had most wanted to avoid from an article 50 extension was giving May a licence to carry on behaving as she has done for what feels like an eternity. They could no longer tolerate the hollow shell of a prime minister shuttling back and forth between Tory hardliners demanding fantasy Brexits and Brussels negotiators who trade in realities.

There is a difference between patience with the prime minister and readiness to help her country navigate through its current crisis. There are still stores of goodwill available for Britain in Brussels, but they cannot be unlocked by May. The bankruptcy of May’s overseas enterprise has been coming since the day she set up shop in No 10. The squandering of credibility started almost at once, with the appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary in 2016. Only someone with a tin ear for European sensibilities would have given the top diplomat job to a man known on the continent as a rogue peddler of anti-Brussels propaganda. Then there was the early negotiating period, during which EU leaders thought May’s robotic, inscrutable manner concealed a deep, strategic intelligence.

They came to realise that there was no mask. The inanity – the reciting of “Brexit means Brexit” even in private meetings – was not the cover story for a secret plan. It was the plan. The point of no return was the summit in Salzburg last September. May was invited to make the case for what was left of her “Chequers plan” to European heads of government. It was late. They were tired. There were other difficult matters to attend to. And instead of speaking candidly, persuasively, passionately or even just coherently, the British prime minister read mechanically from a text that was, in substance, no different from an op-ed article already published under her name in a German newspaper that morning. It was embarrassing and insulting.

Many European diplomats say that was the moment when Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and others realised they were dealing with someone out of her depth, unable to perform at the level required for the job that needed doing.

The extent and range of the impact of a no-deal Brexit is revealed in a confidential Cabinet Office document that warns of a “critical three-month phase” after leaving the EU during which the whole planning operation could be overwhelmed. The classified document, seen by the Guardian, sets out the command and control structures in Whitehall for coping with a no-deal departure and says government departments will have to firefight most problems for themselves – or risk a collapse of “Operation Yellowhammer”. “The … structure will quickly fall if too many decisions are unnecessarily escalated to the top levels that could have reasonably been dealt with internally …” the document says. It also concedes there are “likely to be unforeseen issues and impacts” of a no-deal Brexit that Operation Yellowhammer has been unable to predict.

The Cabinet Office has taken the lead in preparations for no deal and is desperately war-gaming scenarios in the event the UK leaves without a coherent plan. The document includes a flow-chart of a routine no-deal day in Whitehall – which starts at 7am with “situation reports” from across the UK being sent to ministers and senior officials, and continues with non-stop assessments and meetings until 5.30am the following day. This high tempo is likely to be necessary for months, the document says. One source with knowledge of Operation Yellowhammer made clear that while planning had stepped up, the overall picture remained chaotic and “rudderless”.

A petition calling for Article 50 to be revoked and Brexit cancelled has attracted more than three million signatures. The milestone, hit by midday on Friday, was reached after more than two million people signed up in less than 24 hours. It has since become the parliament website’s fastest growing petition despite the service crashing several times on Thursday, apparently unable to cope with demand as people voiced their discontent for Theresa May’s plans for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union. Signatures continued to be added even after the threat of a no-deal exit on 29 March was removed when EU leaders agreed Brexit could be delayed. At one point nearly 2,000 people were signing up every minute.

Analysis by software firm Tableau of the 16,000 petitions running on the government website showed the revoke Article 50 petition had more than three times as many signatures as all the pro-Brexit petitions combined. After the number of signatures passed one million, the petitions committee, a cross-party group of MPs appointed to examine petitions to parliament, said the rate of signing was the highest its website had ever had to deal with. Organiser Margaret Anne Georgiadou wrote: “The government repeatedly claims exiting the EU is ‘the will of the people’. “We need to put a stop to this claim by proving the strength of public support now for remaining in the EU. A People’s Vote may not happen – so vote now.”

It’s not hard to see how this fiasco developed and blossomed. In the 1960s, when I was in college, Marxism offered a neat, pre-engineered template for opposing the odious Establishment that blundered into the Vietnam War. Students then at least had skin in the game: the threat of getting drafted into the army and shipped over to die in the jungle for a senseless conflict. In fact, many young men unsuited for college took refuge there to evade the military. Then, with a bull market in Boomer Generation PhDs, the faculties were soon filled with the former Sixties radicals.

Many were Boomer women, who set out to explain and correct the evolving relations of men and women in the office workplace of the day. By then the war was over. The sick economy of the 1970s put an end to the ability of men to support a family and more women were forced to enter the office environment. Meanwhile radical progressivism needed an ever-fresh supply of new aggrieved parties to justify its agitation against the old Marxist bugbears of bourgeois values and structural oppression — and incidentally fuel academic careers. Hence, the multiplication of victims into handy intersectional categories.

By the 1980s, it also became evident that 60s civil rights legislation to end Jim Crow laws had not solved the quandaries of race in America, and that disappointment refreshed the progressive crusade to heal the world of injustice and inequality. Every other effort to produce equal outcomes for different categories of people had also proved disappointing, so now progressives resort to plain coercion to force equal outcomes at all costs, and nowhere is that behavior more overt than on campus the past decade.

Today marks the sixth anniversary of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange’s effective house arrest in London. He cannot move around in public, because he fears he will be arrested and extradited to America — a daunting prospect, since a UN special rapporteur described Chelsea Manning’s treatment by that country’s justice system as torture. Assange is divisive. Hawks wish him nothing but misfortune and a stretch in jail. According to journalist John Pilger, a leaked official memo says: “Assange is going to make a nice bride in prison. Screw the terrorist. He’ll be eating cat food forever.” If you stand at the other end of the spectrum, Assange is a hero who revealed how our world really works.

Consequently, he has been relentlessly targeted. Hilary Clinton has contributed to this process, as Assange highlighted the Clintons’ links with Saudi Arabia and the multimillion donations that kingdom made to their foundation, after she, as secretary of state, sanctioned an $80bn Saudi arms deal. Assange remains, despite illegal efforts to revoke it, an Australian citizen, but he has not enjoyed the support a person who has not been charged with anything, much less convicted of anything, might expect from a democracy. These are indeed murky waters, but Assange’s ordeal reconfirms a truth: News is something someone, somewhere, does not want published. That’s why he is such a threat.

The UN spokesman said on Monday that tens of thousands of residents have fled the fighting along Yemen’s western coastline, where Yemeni fighters backed by a Saudi-led coalition are engaged in fierce battles with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels. Stephane Dujarric, the spokesman for the UN secretary-general, told reporters on Monday that about 5,200 families, or around 26,000 people, have fled the fighting and sought safety within their own districts or in other areas in Hodeida governorate. ‘‘The number is expected to increase as hostilities continue,’’ he said. Emirati troops, along with irregular and loyalist forces in Yemen, have been fighting against Houthis for Hodeida since Wednesday.

Coalition warplanes rained missiles and bombs on Houthi positions near Hodeida airport, in the city’s south. The offensive for Hodeida has faced criticism from international aid groups, who fear a protracted fight could force a shutdown of the city’s port and potentially tip millions into starvation. About 70 percent of Yemen’s food enters via the port, as well as the bulk of humanitarian aid and fuel supplies. Around two-thirds of the country’s population of 27 million relies on aid, and 8.4 million are already at risk of starving.

Rumors are again swirling of an impending false flag chemical weapons attack in Syria, just as they did shortly before the highly suspicious Douma case in April. Warnings from Syrian and Russian intelligence, as well as US war ship movements and an uptick in US funding for the Al Qaeda propaganda firm known as the White Helmets, give these warnings a fair bit of weight. Since the US war machine has both a known regime change agenda in Syria and an extensive history of using lies, propaganda and false flags to justify military interventionism, there’s no legitimate reason to give it the benefit of the doubt on this one. These warnings are worth taking seriously.

So some people are understandably nervous. The way things are set up now, it is technically possible for the jihadist factions inside Syria and their allied imperialist intelligence and defense agencies to keep targeting civilians with chemical weapons and blaming the Assad government for them until they pull one off that is so outrageous that it enables the mass media to manufacture public support for a full-scale assault on Damascus. This would benefit both the US-centralized empire which has been plotting regime change in Syria for decades and the violent Islamist extremists who seek control of the region. It also creates the very real probability of a direct military confrontation with Syria’s allies, including Russia.

But the appropriate response to the threat of a world war erupting in Syria is not really fear, if you think about it. The most appropriate response to this would be unmitigated, howling rage at the western sociopaths who created this situation in the first place.

Legendary global macro trader Paul Tudor Jones is warning that asset prices are too high. And furthermore, he’s concerned about what the next recession might look like. He shared his thoughts on Monday during a conversation with Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as part of the firm’s “Talks at GS” series. The hedge fund billionaire, who rarely gives interviews or makes public comments on the markets, cautioned that across asset classes “you have to be thinking this is a highly dubious sustainable price.” Jones doesn’t think the low interest rates we have now due to easy monetary policy are sustainable over time. He said that interest rate policy is “crazy.” He further argued that the Trump administration’s stimulative fiscal policy isn’t sustainable either.

“You look at prices of stocks, real estate, anything,” he said. “We’re going to have to mean revert to a normal real rate of interest with a normal term premium that’s existed for 250 years. We’re going to have to get back to that. We’re going to have to get back to a sustainable fiscal policy and that probably means the price of assets goes down in the very long run.” In the short run, the market is “jacked up and ready to go,” he said. Blankfein added that it’s like “pouring lighter fluid on an already lit fire.” During the financial crisis, central banks had a lot of room to ease monetary policy and governments had more flexibility to push stimulative fiscal policy. Today, there’s less room and flexibility.

“The next recession is really frightening because we don’t have any stabilizers,” Jones said. “We’ll have monetary policy, which will exhaust really quickly, but we don’t have any fiscal stabilizers.”

President Donald Trump has requested the United States Trade Representative to identify $200 billion worth of Chinese goods for additional tariffs at a rate of 10 percent. The new duties will go into effect “if China refuses to change its practices, and also if it insists on going forward with the new tariffs that it has recently announced,” the president said in a statement provided by the White House late on Monday. Beijing has pledged to fight back if Trump goes ahead with the new tariffs. U.S. stock index futures fell following the news, while Asian equity markets were mixed. It’s the latest development in escalating trade tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

On Friday, the U.S. announced a 25 percent tariff on up to $50 billion of Chinese products, prompting Chinese President Xi Jinping’s administration to respond witha 25 percent tariff on $34 billion of U.S. goods. “It’s one thing to retaliate with $50 billion here and $50 billion there but when the [U.S.] president trots out another $200 billion, that’s quite concerning,” Max Baucus, former U.S. ambassador to China under President Barack Obama, told CNBC. “This reminds me little bit of an old western … If there’s a gunfight trade war, somebody’s going to get hurt,” he continued: “Trump is going to have to find some way to back down and let China save face so that both sides can back down gradually and respectfully.”

Perhaps nobody knows what President Trump will do next, including President Trump, but right now it looks like he has successfully maneuvered China into a trade trap. The goal is to slow China’s economy such that military modernization slows and its economy cannot catch up with the United States. Meanwhile, implementation of this strategy is called “Beijing’s playbook” and the whole time President Trump speaks positively about Xi Jinping and China’s help in other areas. Bloomberg: Xi to Counter Trump Blow for Blow in Unwanted Trade War “The Chinese view this as an exercise in self-flagellation, meaning that the country that wins a trade war is the country that can endure most pain,” said Andrew Polk, co-founder of research firm Trivium China in Beijing. China “thinks it can outlast the U.S. They don’t have to worry about an election in November, let alone two years from now.”

This is the mistake autocrats always make about Western governments and the United States. They view the messy and inefficient political system (intentionally designed that way to protect liberty) as a weakness. They think politicians care more about elections than anything else. They see the difficulty in reaching consensus as a weakness. However, they miss the fact that democratic governments enjoy greater legitimacy. If the U.S. reaches a majority in favor of confronting China on trade, then President Trump has the far stronger political hand. Confronting China on trade raises President Trump’s popularity. His base and independent voters favor this policy. Democrats oppose him because he is Trump, but they would lose votes if the only issue in November was “Confront China on trade, yes or no?”

Let’s be clear: It’s not just Argentina. But Argentina is the most elegant example. The exodus of the hot money from emerging markets where cheap dollar-debts were used to fund pet projects and jack up leverage is – once again – in full swing. Cheap dollar-debt in emerging markets is an old sin that, like all old sins, is repeated endlessly. The outcome is always trouble. But during the act, it sure is a lot of fun for everyone. The exodus of the hot money is even gripping the non-basket-case emerging economies of Asia where it’s causing the worst indigestion since 2008.

Bloomberg: “Overseas funds are pulling out of six major Asian emerging equity markets at a pace unseen since the global financial crisis of 2008 – withdrawing $19 billion from India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand so far this year.” While emerging markets shone in the first quarter, suggesting resilience to Federal Reserve tightening, that image has shattered over the past two months. With American money market funds now offering yields around 2% – where 10-year Treasuries were just last September – and prospects for more Fed hikes, the bar for heading into riskier assets has been raised.”

“It’s not a great set-up for emerging markets,” James Sullivan, head of Asia ex-Japan equities research at JPMorgan Chase, told Bloomberg. “We’ve still only priced in about two thirds of the US rate increases we expect to see over the next 12 months. So the Fed is continuing to get more hawkish, but the market still hasn’t caught up.” [..] “Dollar funding of emerging market economies has been in turmoil for months now,” Patel wrote – because yeah, the era of the cheap dollar is over, and investors should have figured that out two-and-a-half years ago when the Fed started hiking rates. But the market didn’t want to believe that the Fed would actually do it. And suddenly over the past two months, it downs on these geniuses that the Fed has actually been hiking rates and will continue to do so for some time.

Patel not only blamed the QE unwind but also the simultaneous and massive issuance of new Treasury debt by the US government to fund its ballooning deficits. This new issuance of Treasuries “will absorb such a large share of dollar liquidity that a crisis in the rest of the dollar bond markets is inevitable.”

[..] I wanted a Germany that was hegemonic and efficient, not authoritarian and caught up in a European Ponzi scheme. That was in 2013. Two years later, in March 2015, I wrote an article, while Greece’s finance minister, referring to the first and second bailout loans, of 2010 and 2012. Allow me to quote from it: “The fact is that Greece had no right to borrow from German – or any other European – taxpayers at a time when its public debt was unsustainable. Before Greece took on any loans, it should have initiated debt restructuring and undergone a partial default on debt owed to its private-sector creditors. But this “radical” argument was largely ignored at the time.

Similarly, European citizens should have demanded that their governments refuse even to consider transferring private losses to them. But they failed to do so, and the transfer was effected soon after. The result was the largest taxpayer-backed loan in history, provided on the condition that Greece pursue such strict austerity that its citizens have lost one-quarter of their incomes, making it impossible to repay private or public debts. The ensueing – and ongoing – humanitarian crisis has been tragic… Animosity among Europeans is at an all-time high, with Greeks and Germans, in particular, having descended to the point of moral grandstanding, mutual finger-pointing, and open antagonism. This toxic blame game benefits only Europe’s enemies.”

When French President Emmanuel Macron laid out a sweeping vision for eurozone reform last September, he spoke of “rebuilding Europe”, with a common budget for the euro nations and a single minister to oversee it all. The proposals he will discuss when he sits down with German Chancellor Angela Merkel outside Berlin on Tuesday will be far less ambitious, with deep differences between the two European powerhouses. Many economists agree with Macron that fundamental reforms are needed to strengthen the eurozone and insulate the single currency — the most potent symbol of Europe’s integration — from future crises, like the 2010-13 sovereign debt contagion that nearly tore the euro apart.

But Merkel has limited room to act due to political pressure at home, and is always at pains to ensure France and Germany aren’t pushing ahead with plans that have no deep backing from the rest of the European Union. Macron and Merkel will discuss a separate budget for the 19 countries that share the single currency but much smaller than he wanted. Then there are gaps in opinion over a fund to calm bond markets in a crisis and a backstop for the banking system. “Things are going in the right direction, but the proposals we’re getting from the Germans aren’t sufficient,” said a French official who acknowledged there were deep differences between the two sides.

A German official said there were still big questions about what sort of agreement Tuesday’s meeting would produce on the budget for the euro zone. The official said Merkel’s recent political troubles over migration policy could mean she is less inclined to make concessions to the French leader. Besides the disagreement between France and Germany, it is also the nature of negotiations between the eurozone countries that grand ideas get chipped away at until a compromise is reached that satisfies all parties.

“Where Germany has trading partners willing to borrow big to buy Mercedes and Beemers, the US has the world’s reserve currency, which acts as an unlimited credit card for our entitlement state and military/industrial empire.”

Europe is frequently held up as an example of how the rest of the world should behave on a variety of issues. But this comparison misses at least two things: First, “Europe” is actually a lot of different countries in a lot of different situations. Second, much of what seems to work over there only does so because it’s being financed with ever-increasing amounts of debt. For countries, as for individuals, borrowing money is fun at first but beyond a certain point becomes debilitating, as interest payments begin to crowd out everything else. That’s where a growing number of Europe’s failed states now find themselves, with overly-generous pensions and overly-restrictive labor laws making it virtually impossible to run a functioning market-based economy.

The result: Fewer good jobs and more frustrated voters – especially young ones who have seen only the downside of the current system – and the resulting rise of populist political parties that recognize the problems without offering coherent solutions, thus guaranteeing even more chaos in the future. As Today’s Wall Street Journal notes, in Italy and Greece, nearly a third of young adults not only aren’t working but aren’t enrolled in school or training. What are they doing? Apparently just sitting around and stewing about life’s injustice. As for where they’re sitting and stewing, in Greece, Italy and Spain it’s now normal for adults all the way into their 30s to live with their parents, largely because they can’t find work that pays enough to afford a house, car and other requirements of independent life.

As for Germany, which looks great by comparison, keep in mind that a big part of its economic outperformance is due to other EU countries borrowing huge amounts of money to buy German exports. When the latter run out of money – a point which is clearly coming – Germany suffers twice, once when it loses important customers and again when its banks, having lent trillions of euros to Italy, Spain, et al, have to eat those losses. But bad-mouthing Europe should not be seen as implicit praise of the US. We, like Germany, have an advantage that’s both unfair and temporary. Where Germany has trading partners willing to borrow big to buy Mercedes and Beemers, the US has the world’s reserve currency, which acts as an unlimited credit card for our entitlement state and military/industrial empire.

Spain’s new Socialist government is determined to remove the remains of Francisco Franco from a vast mausoleum near Madrid and turn it into a place of “reconciliation” for a country still coming to terms with the dictator’s legacy. “We don’t have a date yet, but the government will do it,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said late Monday during his first television interview since being sworn in on June 2 after toppling his conservative predecessor Mariano Rajoy in a confidence vote. He recalled that a non-binding motion approved last year in parliament called for Franco’s remains to be exhumed from the massive Valley of the Fallen mausoleum some 50 kilometres (30 miles) northwest of Madrid and the site turned into a “memorial of the victims of fascism”.

“Spain can’t allow symbols that divide Spaniards. Something that is unimaginable in Germany or Italy, countries that also suffered fascist dictatorships, should also not be imaginable in our country,” Sanchez added. Earlier on Monday Socialist party spokesman Oscar Puente said the mausoleum should be transformed into a “place of reconciliation, of memory, for all Spaniards, and not of apology for the dictatorship.” Franco ruled Spain with an iron fist from the end of the country’s 1936-39 civil war until his death in 1975, when he was buried inside a basilica drilled into the side of a mountain at the Valley of the Fallen, one of Europe’s largest mass graves.

The desire to judge people’s motives rather than addressing their needs is a “British disease”. We have been suffering from it for hundreds of years, cycling endlessly through repeated cycles of generosity and harshness. Each cycle ends in public outrage and an abrupt reversal: but the memory eventually fades, and the disease reappears in a new form. In this post, I outline the tragic history of Britain’s repeated attempts to “categorise the poor”.

[..] worst of all, using rules and sanctions to compel the genuinely work-shy to work diverts attention and resources away from those who really need help. And it unfairly stigmatises the vast majority of those who are not working, or who are not working as many hours as we think they should, whether through unemployment, sickness or disability. Study after study has shown that in general, people want to work. The problem is that suitable jobs aren’t always available. And yet there remains a prevalent view, even among people who should know better, that people must be compelled to work, or to work harder, with harsh treatment. But today’s sanctions for those who won’t or can’t work are mild compared to the punishments of old: why should they be any more successful?

We would do better to concentrate our attention on helping those who genuinely want to work to find fulfilling, productive and well-paid jobs. And we should also stop trying to decide whether someone “deserves” social support. We have been trying to distinguish between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor for eight hundred years, and we are no better able to make that judgement now than we were in the fourteenth century, or the sixteenth, or the nineteenth. It is time to give up this fruitless attempt to judge people’s motives. Simply provide everyone with a basic income so that they can afford to live, then let them get on with whatever they want to do.

More than 4,000 public buildings and spaces in England are being sold off every year, with more than 7,000 others at risk over the next five years, a charity has said. Locality says the majority of the sites being offloaded by local authorities are sold to private developers for the highest price, forever lost to communities around them. The charity wants the government to create a £200m-a-year community ownership fund for the next five years to help preserve the buildings and spaces for the use of local people. Tony Armstrong, its chief executive, said: “This is a sell-off on a massive scale. We know that many of the buildings being lost have valuable community uses.

“Everyone of us can think of a local public building or outside space we love and use, from libraries to lidos and town halls to youth centres. They are owned by the public and they’re being sold off for short-term gain to fill holes in council budgets. “Many hundreds of local community groups are stepping up and fighting for community ownership. But they urgently need support and help with startup costs if they are to compete with the commercial developers.” The Great British Sell Off report is published on Tuesday and is based on freedom of information requests sent to all 353 local authorities in England. Locality received 55 responses on the number of buildings and spaces sold between the financial years 2012-13 and 2016-17, as well as 127 replies about sites identified as surplus over the next five years, extrapolating the results to obtain national totals.

Mr. Peterson laid it out nicely: identity politics assigns everyone to ethnic, racial, and sexual groups, and all the human relations among them amount to never-ending battles for political power. Nothing else matters. Individuals especially don’t matter, only the group. And no group has abused its power more than European white men. This animating idea comes out of the mid-20th century “post-structural critical theorists” Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose Marxian views emerged conveniently at a time when women and non-white people were vying for departmental chairs in the college humanities and social science programs, and thus have two generations been indoctrinated.

Well, if human relations are solely about power, than exercising power over others is all that matters. Hence, the key to identity politics: it’s all about coercion, making others do your will by threat of force and force itself. These days, the main threat is depriving heretics and apostates of their livelihood. That’s what happened to Brett Weinstein at Evergreen U in Washington State last year, and to Jordan Peterson himself at the U of Toronto, when he objected loudly and publicly to a new Canadian federal law that sought to punish citizens who refused to use the new menu of personal pronouns for the rapidly multiplying new gender categories (e.g. ze, zir, they, xem, nem, hir, nir….)

Both Weinstein and Peterson refused to be coerced and found themselves inadvertently leading a movement against the pervasive, creeping coercion of our time — which has now spread from the campuses into corporate life, with the HR departments working overtime to enforce thought among employees, because company profits are at stake (e.g. Starbucks day-off for “diversity and inclusion training”).

Fewer people sought asylum in the European Union last year, although numbers remain higher than before the arrival of 1 million people in 2015 triggered a political crisis that continues to divide Europe. Showing a sharp drop in asylum claims, the latest report from the EU’s asylum office was published on Monday after emergency talks in the German government over asylum policy and a bitter standoff between EU nations over a migrant rescue ship that eventually docked in Spain after being banned from Italy and Malta. The EU’s asylum office counted 728,470 applications for international protection in 2017, a 44% reduction on the 1.3m applications the previous year.

More than 1 million people entered the EU in 2015, many fleeing the war in Syria. Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan remain the most frequent countries of origin for asylum seekers, accounting for 29% of all claims. The downward trend of asylum claims continued in the first four months of 2018, the EU asylum office said, although numbers have still not returned to pre-crisis levels. About 460,000 people applied for asylum in EU countries in 2013. The fall in asylum applications reflects a sharp drop in people making the hazardous journey over the eastern Mediterranean to Greece and the central Mediterranean to Italy, although there has been an increase in people travelling from west Africa to Spain, albeit from a lower base.

Germany continues to receive more applications for asylum than any other country in Europe, with 222,560 claims in 2017, folowed by Italy, France and Greece. The UK was in fifth place, with 33,780 applications, accounting for 4.6% of all EU asylum claims. But the backlog remains high: 954,100 claims are awaiting a decision, including 443,640 in Germany, according to the EU asylum office.

Chinese shares tumbled more than 8% on Monday amid renewed fears about the outlook for the world’s No. 2 economy, reviving the specter of a full-blown market crash that prompted unprecedented government intervention earlier this month. Major indexes suffered their largest one-day drop since 2007, shattering a period of relative calm in China’s volatile stock markets since Beijing unleashed a barrage of support measures to arrest a slump that began in mid-June. The CSI300 index .CSI300 of the largest listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen plunged 8.6%, to 3,818.73, while the Shanghai Composite Index .SSEC lost 8.5%, to 3,725.56 points. While the falls followed lackluster data on profit at Chinese industrial firms on Monday and a disappointing private factory sector survey on Friday, there was little to explain the scale of the sell-off.

Some analysts said fears that China may hold off from further loosening of monetary policy had contributed to souring investor sentiment. “The recent rebound had been swift and strong, so there’s need for a technical correction,” said Yang Hai, strategist at Kaiyuan Securities. He said the trigger was “a sluggish U.S. market amid stronger expectations of a Fed rate rise in the fourth quarter. That, coupled with China’s rising pork prices, fuels concerns that China would refrain from loosening monetary policies further.” In late June and early July, Chinese authorities cut interest rates, suspended initial public offerings, relaxed margin-lending and collateral rules and enlisted brokerages to buy stocks, backed by central bank cash, to support share prices.

The battery of stabilization measures followed a peak-to-trough slump of more than 30% in China’s benchmark indexes, which had more than doubled over the preceding year. Chinese share markets had recovered around 15% since then, before Monday’s renewed sell-off. Stocks fell across the board on Monday, with 2,247 companies falling, leaving only 77 gainers.

The biggest slump in Chinese shares in eight years led equities lower worldwide and selling spread to the dollar as the turmoil bolstered the case for keeping U.S. interest rates lower for longer. Stocks fell in Europe for a fifth day after the Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.5% as Chinese industrial company profits decreased in June. The dollar weakened 0.8% to $1.1069 per euro at 10:22 a.m. in London while Italian and Spanish bonds pared losses. Gold futures rose the most in a month as the drop in equities spurred haven demand and investors speculated that recent losses have been overdone. “Today’s rout in China poured cold water on investor sentiment,” said Mari Oshidari at Okasan Securities. “This also revealed the market is still too fragile without government support.”

The profit decline is the latest evidence of a deteriorating economic outlook for China, while the slump in stocks will be a blow to policy makers who enacted unprecedented measures to stem a $4 trillion rout. A gauge of Chinese stocks in Hong Kong slumped 3.8% Monday, while the city’s benchmark Hang Seng Index slid 3.1%. The report on industrial profits from the statistics bureau followed data Friday showing a private manufacturing gauge unexpectedly declined in July to a 15-month low. Chinese officials allowed more than 1,400 companies to halt trading, banned major shareholders from selling stakes, restricted short selling and suspended initial public offerings, spurring a 16% rebound on the Shanghai measure through last week from a low on July 8.

The IMF has urged the nation to eventually unwind the support measures, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A secret cell at the Greek finance ministry hacked into the government computers and drew up elaborate plans for a system of parallel payments that could be switched from euros to the drachma at the “flick of a button” . The revelations have caused a political storm in Greece and confirm just how close the country came to drastic measures before premier Alexis Tsipras gave in to demands from Europe’s creditor powers, acknowledging that his own cabinet would not support such a dangerous confrontation.

Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister, told a group of investors in London that a five-man team under his control had been working for months on a contingency plan to create euro liquidity if the ECB cut off emergency funding to the Greek financial system, as it in fact did after talks broke down and Syriza called a referendum. The transcripts were leaked to the Greek newspaper Kathimerini. The telephone call took place a week after he stepped down as finance minister. “The prime minister, before we won the election in January, had given me the green light to come up with a Plan B. And I assembled a very able team, a small team as it had to be because that had to be kept completely under wraps for obvious reasons,” he said.

“The context of all this is that they want to present me as a rogue finance minister, and have me indicted for treason. It is all part of an attempt to annul the first five months of this government and put it in the dustbin of history,” he said. “It totally distorts my purpose for wanting parallel liquidity. I have always been completely against dismantling the euro because we never know what dark forces that might unleash in Europe,” he said. The goal of the computer hacking was to enable the finance ministry to make digital transfers at “the touch of a button”. The payments would be ‘IOUs’ based on an experiment by California after the Lehman crisis. A parallel banking system of this kind would allow the government to create euro liquidity and circumvent what Syriza called “financial strangulation” by the ECB.

“This was very well developed. Very soon we could have extended it, using apps on smartphones, and it could become a functioning parallel system. Of course this would be euro denominated but at the drop of a hat it could be converted to a new drachma,” he said. Mr Varoufakis claimed the cloak and dagger methods were necessary since the Troika had taken charge of the public revenue office within the finance ministry. “It’s like the Inland Revenue in the UK being controlled by Brussels. I am sure as you are hearing these words your hair is standing on end,” he said in the leaked transcripts. Mr Varoufakis said any request for permission would have tipped off the Troika immediately that he was planning a counter-attack.

Mr Varoufakis said that Mr Schauble has made up his mind that Greece must be ejected from the euro, and is merely biding his time, knowing that the latest bail-out plan is doomed to failure. “Everybody knows the IMF does not want to take part in a new programme but Schauble is insisting that it does as a condition for new loans. I have a strong suspicion that there will be no deal on August 20,” he said. He said the EU authorities may have to dip further into the European Commission’s stabilisation fund (EFSM), drawing Britain deeper into the controversy since it is a contributor. By the end of the year it will be clear that tax revenues are falling badly short of targets – he said – and the Greek public ratio will be shooting up towards 210pc of GDP. “Schauble will then say it is yet another failure. He is just stringing us along. he has not given up his plan to push Greece out of the euro,” he said.

Some members of Greece’s leftist government wanted to raid central bank reserves and hack taxpayer accounts to prepare a return to the drachma, according to reports on Sunday that highlighted the chaos in the ruling Syriza party. It is not clear how seriously the plans, attributed to former Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis and former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, were considered by the government and both ministers were sacked earlier this month. However the reports have been seized on by opposition parties who have demanded an explanation. The reports came at the end of a week of fevered speculation over what Syriza hardliners had in mind as an alternative to the tough bailout terms that Tsipras reluctantly accepted to keep Greece in the euro.

Around a quarter of the party’s 149 lawmakers rebelled over the plan to pass sweeping austerity measures in exchange for up to €86 billion euros in fresh loans and Tsipras has struggled to hold the divided party together In an interview with Sunday’s edition of the RealNews daily, Panagiotis Lafazanis, the hardline former energy minister who lost his job after rebelling over the bailout plans, said he had urged the government to tap the reserves of the Bank of Greece in defiance of the ECB. Lafazanis, leader of a hardline faction in the ruling Syriza party that has argued for a return to the drachma, said the move would have allowed pensions and public sector wages to be paid if Greece were forced out of the euro.

“The main reason for that was for the Greek economy and Greek people to survive, which is the utmost duty every government has under the constitution,” he said. However he denied a report in the Financial Times that he wanted Bank of Greece Governor Yannis Stouranaras to be arrested if he had opposed a move to empty the central bank vaults. In comments to the semi-official Athens News Agency, he called the report a mixture of “lies, fantasy, fear-mongering, speculation and old-fashioned anti-communism”.

Some members of Greece’s leftist-led government wanted to raid central bank reserves and hack taxpayer accounts to prepare a return to the drachma, according to reports that highlighted the chaos in the ruling Syriza party. It is not clear how seriously the government considered the plans, attributed to former energy minister Panagiotis Lafazanis and ex-finance minister Yanis Varoufakis. Both ministers were sacked earlier this month, however, the revelations have been seized on by opposition parties who are demanding an explanation. The reports on Sunday came at the end of a week of fevered speculation over what Syriza hardliners had in mind as an alternative to the tough bailout terms Tsipras has reluctantly accepted to keep Greece in the eurozone.

About a quarter of the party’s 149 lawmakers rebelled over proposals to pass sweeping austerity measures in exchange for up to €86bn in fresh loans. Tsipras has been struggling to hold the party together. In an interview with Sunday’s edition of the RealNews daily, Lafazanis said he had urged the government to tap the reserves of the Bank of Greece in defiance of the ECB. Lafazanis, the leader of a hardline Syriza faction that has argued for a return to the drachma, said the move would have allowed pensions and public sector wages to be paid if Greece were forced out of the euro. “The main reason for that was for the Greek economy and Greek people to survive, which is the utmost duty every government has under the constitution,” he said.

In a separate report in the conservative Kathimerini newspaper, Varoufakis was quoted as saying that a small team in Syriza had prepared plans to secretly copy online tax codes. It said the “plan b” was devised to allow the government to introduce a parallel payment system if the banks were closed down. In remarks the newspaper said were made at an investors’ conference on 16 July, Varoufakis said passwords used by Greeks to access their online tax accounts were to have been duplicated secretly and used to issue new PIN numbers for every taxpayer to be used in transactions with the state. “This would have created a parallel banking system, which would have given us some breathing space, while the banks would have been shut due to the ECB’s aggressive policy,” Varoufakis was quoted as saying.

This is a transcript of Speaker Zoe Konstantopoulou’s important July 22nd speech in the Hellenic Parliament.

I confess that the consciously, politically and personally painful moments which we are being called on to experience in parliament during this parliamentary term are multiplying. From my capacity as Speaker of the House, I have just sent a letter to the President, Mr. Prokopis Pavlopoulos and to Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras noting that it is my institutional responsibility to emphasize and underline that the conditions this bill is being introduced under allow no guarantees of compliance with the constitution, no protection of the democratic process or the exercise of legislative power of parliament, nor a conscience vote by members of parliament, under conditions of blatant blackmail, which is aimed by foreign government of EU member States at this government and the members of parliament and which is in fact introduced without any possibility of amendment by the parliament as was confessed by the Minister, whom I honor and respect deeply, as he knows, a statute through which a major intervention in the functioning of justice and the exercise of the fundamental rights of the citizens is being attempted, in a manner that tears down both the functioning of Greek democracy as a social state under the rule of law and in which there is a separation of powers according to the constitution, as well as the preservation of the principle of fair trial.

Ministers are being coerced to introduce a legislation whose content they do not agree with, and the statement made by the Justice Minister was characteristic, but who are directly opposed to it and members of parliament are being coerced to vote for it who are also opposed to its content, and the statements made by members of parliament in the two parliamentary groups, which make up the parliamentary majority were also characteristic, every one of them. All this is happening under the direct threat of a disorderly default and reveal that, in truth, this bill which foreign governments and not the Greek government have chosen as a prerequisite, is an attempt at the completion of a dissolution. Because this bill contains a major intervention into the third independent function, which is justice. This bill attempts to undermine the functioning of justice and is lifting basic guarantees to a fair trial and basic and fundamental rights of citizens.

Whenever you are in a room with European officials and discuss the euro, there is usually somebody who raises his finger and says: “This is all well and good, but it is ‘against the rules’.” It then gets very quiet. “Against the rules” is a big thing in Europe. Most people do not really know what the rules are. But they do know that rules have to be followed. The situation reminds me of a short story by Franz Kafka, Before the Law, where a man tries to seek entrance to a courthouse. A door keeper tells him that this is possible in principle, but not at the moment. The man spends his entire life in front of the court waiting to be admitted. At the end of his life he was told that he could have gone through the door at any time. That man followed the wrong set of rules — rules of the mind, not of the law.

Rules of the mind is what we are dealing with in the European debate about the single currency. Many of these rules either do not exist, or they constitute some rather far-fetched interpretation of existing rules. During the recent Greek crisis, I came across a completely new rule. I first heard it from Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister. It says that countries are not allowed to default inside the eurozone. But a default was perfectly fine once they leave the euro, on the other hand. I later read that Otmar Issing, the former chief economist of the European Central Bank, used almost exactly the same phrase as Mr Schäuble in an Italian newspaper interview. If so many important people say it, then surely it must be true, mustn’t it? Actually, as it turns out, there is no such rule.

There is only Article 125 of the European Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union. Article 125 says that countries should not take on the debt of other countries. This is also known as the “no-bailout” clause — though that, as it turns out, is a rather loaded interpretation. In its landmark Pringle ruling — relating to an Irish case in 2012 — the European Court of Justice said bailouts are fine, even under Article 125, as long as the purpose of the bailout is to render the fiscal position of the recipient country sustainable in the long run. In another landmark ruling, from June this year, the ECJ supported Mario Draghi’s promise to do whatever it takes to help a country subject to a speculative attack.

The ECB president’s pledge had previously been challenged by the German constitutional court. In both cases, the ECJ did not support the predominant German legal interpretation. So what then can we infer from the previous ECJ rulings in the absence of an explicit ruling from the court on debt relief? An interesting article by three authors from Bruegel, a European think-tank, concludes that debt relief is almost certainly consistent with current law. The argument goes as follows: in the Pringle case, the court gave the go-ahead for bailouts in principle as long as they are intended to stabilise public finances. In the ruling on the ECB’s backstop, the court accepted the principle that the ECB could incur a loss on its asset purchases, as long as the bank follows its own mandate.

What is really happening is that Germany does not want to grant Greece debt relief for political reasons, and is using European law as a pretext. Likewise, when Mr Schäuble proposes a Greek exit from the euro, ask yourself what rule that is consistent with. The fact is they are making up the rules as they go along to suit their own political purposes.

Near-term technological considerations aside, the question that the Greeks and other peoples of the West may wish to ask is why banks and bankers whose livelihoods derive from the public grant to create and allocate money should be allowed to use it to rule the world? The quote from economist Joan Robinson that ‘The only thing worse than being exploited by capitalism is not being exploited by capitalism’ refers to precisely this type of engineered dependency, not to a natural state of the world. Was the intent of the European Union a partnership of equals then Syriza would have been granted a distinctive voice. With its mandate to remain within the union it is but another set of bodies warming the chairs at ‘negotiation’ tables listening to the dictates of the Troika.

The pragmatic difficulties of following the democratic mandate from the July 5th referendum derive from complexities that were sold as simplifications. Instead of multiple currencies the EMU would have only one— a simplification. However, any exit from the currency union will require the rapid constitution / reconstitution of a monetary infrastructure now rendered infinitely more complex through the broader project of joining finance capital’s ways of conducting business. A long-term exit plan assumes that Syriza can either stay in, or regain, power when political control has already been acceded to the Troika through economic control. An unplanned exit that allows the engineered complexity of monetary integration to quickly destroy the Greek economy would most likely find desperation leading to restoration of a compliant Greek government in dramatically worsened economic conditions.

What isn’t being put forward in the present, as best I can determine, is a left vision of possible economic organization either after a well-planned exit from the monetary union has been accomplished or after the broader EMU project has imploded from its own capitalist / banker-friendly design. The Western criticism that the European periphery is destined for permanent second-class status grants primacy to the wholly unsustainable political economy of the Western ‘center’ and to ‘first-world’ capitalism as a habitable form of social organization. Economic complexity is being used as a tool of social repression leaving either simplification or complexity that serves a social purpose as alternatives.

Greek banks are set to keep broad cash controls in place for months, until fresh money arrives from Europe and with it a sweeping restructuring, officials believe. Rehabilitating the country’s banks poses a difficult question. Should the euro zone take a stake in the lenders, first requiring bondholders and even big depositors to shoulder a loss, or should the bill for fixing the banks instead be added to Greece’s debt mountain? Answering this could hold up agreement on a third bailout deal for Greece that negotiators want to conclude within weeks. The longer it takes, the more critical the banks’ condition becomes as a €420 weekly limit on cash withdrawals chokes the economy and borrowers’ ability to repay loans.

“The banks are in deep freeze but the economy is getting weaker,” said one official, pointing to a steady rise in loans that are not being repaid. This cash ‘freeze’ is unlikely to thaw soon, although capital controls may be slightly softened, such as the loosening on Friday of restrictions on foreign transfers by businesses. “Ultimately, you can only lift the capital controls when the banks are sufficiently capitalized,” said Jens Weidmann, the head of Germany’s Bundesbank, which pushed the ECB to pare back bank funding, leading to their three-week closure. The debate is interlinked with a wrangle over reforms, about Greek sovereignty in the face of European controls and whether the country can recover with ever rising debts that have topped €300 billion, far bigger than its economy.

Were another €25 billion to be piled on top – the amount foreseen for the recapitalization of Greek lenders – it would add to debts that the IMF has argued are excessive. Greek officials, alarmed by a downward spiral in the economy, want an urgent release of funds for their banks. Four big banks dominate Greece. Of those, National Bank of Greece, Eurobank and Piraeus fell short in an ECB health check last year, when their restructuring plans were not taken into account. The situation is now dramatically worse. “We want, if possible, an initial amount to be ready for the first needs of the banks,” said one official at the Greek finance ministry, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “That should be about €10 billion.”

Others, including Germany, however, are lukewarm and could push for losses for large depositors with more than 100,000 euros on their accounts, or bondholders. There are more than €20 billion of such deposits in Greece’s four main banks, dwarfing the roughly €3 billion of bonds the banks have issued. Imposing a loss, something the Greek government has repeatedly denied any planning for, would be controversial, not least because much of this money is held by small Greek companies rather than wealthy individuals. “This is not like Cyprus where you can say these are just Russian oligarchs,” said an insolvency lawyer familiar with Greece. “It’s the very community everyone is hoping will resuscitate Greece, namely the corporates. You’ll end up depriving them of their cash.”

Greece’s debt is unsustainable. The IMF has said so, and it’s hard to find anyone who disagrees. The Greek government sees structural reform without debt reduction as politically and economically toxic. The main governing party, Syriza, has made debt reduction a central plank of its electoral platform and will find it hard to hold on to power – much less implement painful structural measures – absent this achievement. Moreover, tax increases and spending cuts by themselves will only deepen the Greek slump. Other measures are needed to attract the investment required to jump-start growth. Reducing the debt and its implicit claim on future incomes is an obvious first step. But Wolfgang Schaeuble and Chancellor Angela Merkel refuse to consider any cut in the nominal stock of Greece’s debt to the EU.

They refuse to agree to debt-service reductions without prior structural reforms. In their view, lower interest rates, grace periods and more generous amortization terms should be a reward for prior action on the structural front. If they are offered now, Greece will only be let off the hook. There’s an obvious way of squaring this circle: Greece and the EU should contractually link changes in the terms of the country’s EU loans to milestones in structural reform. Think of the result as structural-reform-indexed (SRI) loans, akin to former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis’s gross-domestic- product-indexed bonds. Under the new loan terms, if Greece implements more reforms, future interest payments would be permanently lower and principal payments would be extended indefinitely.

Full implementation of the specified reforms would turn Greece’s debt into the equivalent of zero-coupon, infinitely lived bonds that drain little if anything from the public purse. Greece should welcome this arrangement, because it would receive a guarantee of debt reduction, not just vague reassurances. The German government and other creditors should welcome it as well, because debt reduction would only be conferred if Greece follows through with structural reform. Both sides would appreciate that Greece’s incentive to push ahead with reforms would be heightened insofar as successful reform conferred an additional reward. Even better, Euro-group members could convert their bilateral loans and European Financial Stability Facility/European Stability Mechanism funding for Greece into SRI bonds.

His party is split, government undermined and the economy lies in tatters. Yet in the rubble of Greece, Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras reigns supreme. In the six months since he became prime minister, Tsipras breezed past challengers at home, new and old, as he followed an election victory with backing for his anti-bailout message in a referendum. After yielding to his European peers, next month he may be signing a third financial rescue that he opposed, while capital controls keeping money in Greece remain. The paradox reflects how punch-drunk Greece has become after years of spending cuts and tax increases by successive governments allied to the euro region’s austerity hawks.

For all his doomed brinkmanship, Tsipras’s popularity is unblemished as Greeks blame Europe for their financial punishment, or others in his Coalition of the Radical Left. “His rhetoric of defiance, resistance and regaining sovereignty flies well with Greek public opinion,” said Wolfango Piccoli, of consulting company Teneo Intelligence “He is by far the most popular politician across the whole spectrum.” A poll by Kapa Research published on July 14 showed 51.5% of Greeks backed the new terms Tsipras agreed to in return for staying in the euro. The blame for the pension cuts and higher taxes rested with the Europeans, 49% said, while 68% said Tsipras should lead the country. For now, he has to deal with the party that he brought to power.

Tsipras, who turns 41 this week, purged his government of dissenters after bringing home the deal that promised the exact opposite of what he pledged to voters in January. Even as he clawed back some supporters in last week’s parliament vote, Syriza officials publicly worried about the chasm growing between dissident leftists and the more pragmatic group Tsipras leads, fearing a breakup of the party. “The question is whether Tsipras will remain the leader of Syriza or he will form his own party with those who support him in Syriza,” said George Tzogopoulos at the Athens-based Hellenic Foundation. “It is probably easier for him to purge Syriza.” For now, the focus is on filling in the outlines of the deal agreed with creditors on July 13. Tsipras could then move to consolidate his position by holding elections. [..]

Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister and face of successive failures to reach an accord with the euro region, garnered the most votes of any party candidate in the Jan. 25 election. He now has a popularity rating of 28%, compared with 59% for Tsipras in the Kapa poll. Comrades causing Tsipras headaches, such as former Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafanzanis and Speaker of Parliament Zoe Konstantopoulou, both polled lower than Varoufakis. “It is more and more a Tsipras government and party,” said Piccoli. “His U-turn has been justified with a narrative that argues that there was no other option.”

After months at the center of a global political spectacle, Varoufakis still carried himself as an outsider: informal, ironic, somehow alone on the stage. This demeanor had sometimes given his tenure the air of a five-month-long TED talk. At the restaurant, Varoufakis’s commentary on the recent tumult, and on the likely catastrophic events to come, sometimes seemed amused almost to the point of blitheness. He asked after Galbraith’s children, then noted that, a few hours earlier, a member of Germany’s parliament had visited his apartment, confessing, “I don’t believe in what we’re doing to you.” The legislator was a Christian Democrat—the party led by Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who had it in her power to ease Greece’s crisis. On departing, the legislator said, “I know you’re an atheist, but I’m going to pray for you.”

Varoufakis made a call. Speaking Greek, he greeted Euclid Tsakalotos, a colleague and friend, as “comrade,” then speculated about Tsipras’s behavior in the event of a “yes” vote: “The wise guys in Maximos”—the Prime Minister’s residence—“have become nicely settled in their seats of power, and they don’t want to leave them.” Varoufakis seemed to be suggesting that Tsipras would not resign after losing the referendum. There would be a “strategic restructuring,” Varoufakis said, and then elections. As for himself, he said, “After tomorrow, I’m going to be riding into the sunset.” He spoke the last four words in English. A Roma boy came to the table, selling roses. “Varoufakis!” he said, amazed. “I saw you on the news.”

Varoufakis allowed himself to be teased for his habit of carrying a backpack, which, he was told, made him look like a schoolboy. He laughed and paid five euros for a rose, which he gave to Stratou. As the boy left, he shouted “Varoufakis! Varoufakis!” at a vender’s volume, and, a few tables away, the minister’s plainclothes security detail—two chic young men who bore a resemblance to George Michael at the time of “Faith”—turned around. Galbraith told Varoufakis that his instinct was wrong about the referendum results. “No” would prevail, despite the bank closures. Many Greeks had nothing left to lose, and many others had hedged their financial assets, perhaps by buying a car. “Maybe,” Varoufakis said.

Stratou glanced at her phone. “Jamie, you might be right,” she said. She showed Varoufakis her screen. A survey was showing “no” with a lead. “Don’t underestimate your countrymen—the most utterly fearless group of people,” Galbraith said. Although a “no” victory would complicate Varoufakis’s immediate political future, he allowed himself to marvel at the Greek electorate’s willingness to accept immediate economic hardship. Syriza had given Greeks no palpable relief since taking power, yet the party’s positions still had popular support. “What the hell is going on?” Varoufakis asked. The waiter brought a metal jug of wine. Galbraith raised his glass and, freighting an old shared joke with new emotion, quoted Che Guevara: “Hasta la victoria siempre?!?” (“Ever onward to victory!”) Varoufakis laughed.

Technical teams representing Greece’s lenders began arriving in Athens on Sunday, with the aim of talks with the government beginning on Tuesday. The mission heads are not expected in Athens until Wednesday or Thursday. The visiting officials have asked to have access to ministries, ministers and general secretaries. So far, the Greek side has only agreed for the meetings to take place in a hotel and for the visitors to be allowed access to the General State Accounting Office. One of the potential stumbling blocks is that the lenders are expecting the government to draft another bill with prior actions so it can be passed through Parliament in the next two or three weeks, despite already adopting two pieces of legislation with new measures in the past two weeks.

Aid workers called for emergency accommodation for hundreds of migrants who are camped out in the streets of the Greek capital as it struggles back from the brink of financial collapse. Hundreds of refugees from Afghanistan and Syria have set up temporary camps in central Athens while waiting to move on to what they hope will be a more permanent home in Europe. There are two chemical toilets in the park for the migrants and they wash themselves by using a garden hose attachment at the park’s taps. Stagnant water and human waste attract mosquitoes, and some of the children who walk barefoot in the park are covered in insect bites. Strewn with old clothes, garbage and waste and with summer temperatures reaching as high as 38 degrees Celsius (100.4°F), the sites are unfit for habitation but remain because there is no alternative.

“We need a campus because more and more people are coming so they cannot live like this in the center of the city,” said Nikitas Kanakis, president of the Greek section of medical charity Doctors of the World. “It’s not good for them, it’s not safe for them, and it’s not good for the city,” he said. [..] “It’s a huge problem because there are families with young children in a really bad situation with no water, with no food,” Kanakis said, adding that his organisation tried to provide basic medical care but more was needed. “We need a place, a center where they can stay,” he said. Along with Italy, which has faced a massive influx of African migrants arriving by boat from Libya, Greece is at the front lines of a crisis that has threatened to overwhelm public services already worn down by years of recession.

According to figures from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, migrant arrivals in Greece have leapt almost tenfold in the first six months of the year, jumping from 3,452 in the first six months of 2014 to 31,037 this year. A coordinated response from Europe has been slow in coming however, caught up by wrangling over how to distribute the arrivals among countries where anti-immigration parties have seen a steady rise in support. “This is an emergency for Europe not to tell that they will help, to help. Otherwise, the situation will become worse and worse and we will see in the middle of Athens pictures that the humanitarian doctors have seen back in the east or back in Africa,” Kanakis said.

French farmers blocked roads from Spain and Germany on Sunday to stop foreign products entering the country, the latest protest against a fall in food prices that has brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. Farmers in the north-eastern Alsace region used tractors to obstruct six routes from Germany in a bid to stop trucks crossing the Rhine carrying agricultural goods, in a blockage that is expected to last until at least Monday afternoon. “We let the cars and everything that comes from France pass,” Franck Sander, president of the local branch of the powerful FDSEA union said, adding that more than a thousand agricultural workers were taking part in the roadblocks. A dozen trucks have been forced to turn back at the border since the blockage started at about 10pm on Sunday night.

Meanwhile, about 100 farmers ransacked dozens of trucks from Spain on a highway in the south-western Haute-Garonne region, threatening to unload any meat or fruit destined for the French market. They used 10 tractors to block the A645 motorway, not far from the Spanish border, causing traffic jams that stretched up to four kilometres, Guillaume Darrouy, secretary general of the Young Farmers of Haute-Garonne, told AFP. The action comes after a week that has seen farmers block cities, roads and tourist sites across France in protest at falling food prices, which they blame on foreign competition, as well as supermarkets and distributors. Farmers have dumped manure in cities, blocked access roads and motorways and hindered tourists from reaching Mont St-Michel in northern France, one of the country’s most visited sites.

Fearful of France’s powerful agricultural lobby, the government on Wednesday unveiled an emergency package worth €600m in tax relief and loan guarantees, but the aid has done little to stop the unrest. “The measures announced by the government … none of them deal with the distortion of competition” with farmers from other countries, said Sander, saying French farmers face higher labour costs and quality standards. A combination of factors, including changing dietary habits, slowing Chinese demand and a Russian embargo on western products over Ukraine, has pushed down prices for staples like beef, pork and milk. Paris has estimated that about 10% of farms in France – approximately 22,000 operations – are on the brink of bankruptcy with a combined debt of €1bn.

Seven years of economic setbacks can break one’s spirit. At least that seems to be the case in Italy, where many unemployed are losing hope of finding a job The International Labour Organization gives unemployment status only to people who made at least one job-seeking effort in the last 30 days. According to the European Union’s statistics agency, almost 4.5 million Italians who are willing to work failed to make such an effort in the first quarter. That’s the most since the series started in 1998. For every 100 working Italians there are 15 persons seeking a job and another 20 willing to work but not actively searching, the highest level among the 28 EU countries, according to statistics agency Eurostat.

Driven by survival necessity, Greeks are much more active compared to Italians, with a willing-to-work-but-not-seeking aggregate totaling only 3.1 percent of the extended labor force. That compares with 15 percent of Italians, as shown in the following chart, which covers the first three months of 2015. The main reason pushing up the Italian number seems to be discouragement: after seeking and not finding work, many Italians lose hope of securing a decent occupation and retreat toward family tasks or activities in the informal economy. Italy surpasses formerly communist Bulgaria in this discouragement tendency while Danes are the least discouraged based on numbers for 2014, the most recent figures available for this category.

Ruling Madrid and Barcelona is a tale of two cities as their new mayors forge their own styles of government even though both emerged from the same anti-austerity movement as Podemos. In Barcelona, Ada Colau has frozen hotel openings in a bid to prevent the city from becoming overrun by hordes that afflict tourist hot spots like Venice. In Madrid, Manuela Carmena has ruled out a plan put forward by her own finance chief to levy a charge on visitors to the city and has said she welcomes investment in tourism.
Colau and Carmena swept to power in Spain’s two biggest cities in local elections held in May as voters gave their verdict on three years of austerity imposed by the pro-business People’s Party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

The way they run their cities will help investors parse the political climate in Spain, with polls showing that Podemos, an ally of Greece’s Syriza, may have a chance to shape national policy after general elections due by the end of the year. “A leader needs to be an example to follow to all,” Ismael Clemente, CEO of Merlin Properties, Spain’s largest real estate trust, said in Madrid. “We met with some of Carmena’s team and they were open minded, ready to listen and reasonable.” Colau, 41, who rose to prominence in Spain leading protests against evictions, won power as head of the Barcelona en Comu movement which includes Podemos. Podemos also backed the Ahora Madrid campaign of Carmena, a 71-year-old labor-rights lawyer, who ended 24 years of rule by Rajoy’s PP in the capital.

With the general election set to redraw Spain’s political map and Greece ravaged by Syriza’s failed attempt to overturn European austerity demands, the paths taken by Madrid and Barcelona may have ramifications for the rest of Europe. Both cities are under scrutiny from voters as the nation prepares to go to the polls, Antonio Barroso at Teneo Intelligence, said by phone. Colau’s decree freezing new investment threatens projects including the conversion for hotel use of the Agbar Tower operated by Hyatt Hotels and Deutsche Bank’s headquarters in the upscale Passeig de Gracia avenue. She said in a June 1 interview with El Pais that she wanted to put a moratorium on new hotels and tourist apartments to stop mass tourism getting out of control.

Mario Draghi can take a break from being a full-time Greek crisis firefighter and get back to the job of fostering economic recovery across the euro area. Although the 19-nation currency bloc has avoided losing a member and the market upheaval that might have entailed, reports this week will probably show the economy is hardly firing on all cylinders. Three years after Draghi promised to do “whatever it takes” to keep the union together, the ECB has its work cut out to speed up the pace of growth and inflation. A weaker euro and the ECB’s quantitative-easing program are helping the economy find its feet, with the second quarter forecast to show a ninth quarter of expansion. Consumer-price growth remains too low, however, and unemployment, particularly in southern European states, is stubbornly high.

“The Greek issue moves from page 1 to 2 or 3 in the minds of traders and economists,” said Holger Sandte, chief European analyst at Nordea in Copenhagen. “Now attention turns to more classic macro style things.” The euro-area jobless rate was little changed at 11% in June, while inflation held at 0.2% in July, according to surveys of economists before data this week. Economic confidence probably dipped this month, as did Germany’s Ifo business climate index. Due at 10 a.m. Frankfurt time, economists predict it fell to a five-month low of 107.2 from 107.4. The euro-area economy maintained its growth at the start of the third quarter, weathering strains on confidence from the crisis in Greece, judging by a closely watched manufacturing and services index.

Still, that barometer also showed German factory growth weakened, with exports falling for the first time in six months. In France, manufacturing has shrunk in all but one of the last 15 months. “It’s better but not good — we are improving from an extremely low level and have awful lot of catch-up to do,” especially on investment spending, said David Milleker, chief economist at Union Investment Privatfonds GmbH in Frankfurt. The ECB sees the economy growing 1.5% this year, picking up to 1.9% in 2016. Price growth will be almost non-existent this year, at 0.3%, though the ECB expects its bond buying to help push that to 1.5% in 2016.

Australia’s currency has had one of the most rapid depreciations of its real exchange rate, only beaten by a ragged bunch of troubled economies. Kieran Davies of Barclays Plc estimates that the Aussie’s 16% fall from 2013 to the end of the second quarter is the fastest after Colombia — where growth has halved; Russia, which is in recession; Brazil, which is also in a slump, and Japan. All these economies bar Japan are struggling with plunging oil and commodity prices as China’s economy slows. “Excluding the brief fall at the worst point of the global financial crisis, this is the lowest level since 2007” for the Australian dollar, said Davies, chief economist at Barclays in Australia, who reckons the real exchange rate has fallen a further 3% so far this quarter.

The depreciation should add half a %age point to growth this year and next, he said. Still, Davies, using the Reserve Bank of Australia’s fair value model, estimates the real exchange rate remains 6% overvalued this quarter given the larger fall in commodity prices over the period. The central bank’s own commodity price index has dropped 37% since the start of 2013 in U.S. dollar terms. As a result, he thinks the RBA is unlikely to alter its negative language on the currency. “I think they’d be comfortable with it still going lower,” said Davies, a former Treasury official. “Sometimes the RBA has dropped the reference to the currency drop being necessary and the market’s read too much into it and the RBA has then had to backtrack.”

The world’s big energy groups have shelved $200bn of spending on new projects in an urgent round of cost-cutting aimed at protecting investors’ dividends as the oil price slumps for a second time this year. The sell-off in oil has been matched by a broader slump in copper, gold and other raw materials, pushing the Bloomberg commodities index to a six-year low over concerns of weaker Chinese growth and rising supplies across the board. The plunge in crude prices since last summer has resulted in the deferral of 46 big oil and gas projects with 20bn barrels of oil equivalent in reserves — more than Mexico’s entire proven holdings — according to consultancy Wood Mackenzie.

Among companies postponing big production plans while they wait for costs to come down are UK-listed BP, Anglo-Dutch Royal Dutch Shell, US-based Chevron, Norway’s Statoil, and Australia’s Woodside Petroleum. Research from Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy, found in May that $118bn of projects had been put on hold, but the Wood Mackenzie study shows the toll is now much greater. The decline in Brent crude, which has more than halved in the past year, was triggered by Opec’s decision not to cut output in the face of a US supply glut and weaker than expected demand. After stabilising in March, oil prices have faced renewed pressure, with Brent falling below $55 a barrel this month — a 20% decline from a five-month high reached in early May.

More than half the reserves put on hold lie thousands of feet under the sea, including in the Gulf of Mexico and off west Africa, where the technical demands of extracting crude and earlier inflation have pushed up the cost of projects. Deepwater drilling rigs cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a day to hire and these projects could yet proceed if contractors’ costs fall far enough. Canada is the biggest single region affected, with the development of some 5.6bn barrels of reserves, almost all oil sands, having been deferred.